5/7/2023 0 Comments Dont quit kembe xThough Kembe doesn’t get particularly close to the hyperbolically precocious poetics that Nasty revealed on his debut, he does showcase a smoothness which, along with great beats, makes Self Rule a pleasant listen with plenty of intrigue for the future thrown in. Make no mistake, Illmatic is the primary touchstone here, and that’s never clearer than it is on one of the best songs, “Visions.” The hook, which speaks of “visions of the world being mine” is strongly reminiscent of the casual ambition of an adolescent Nas, another young guy who was willing to claim the world (although Nas claimed it for the listeners). He’s similarly comfortable on “The Wager (In Rod We Lust),” a two minute meditation on a bright future, thoughts which gaze skyward but are expressed with a grounded humility. But this is the first song where Kembe is in the pocket the entire time, speeding up his tempo and making the beat work for him. “Don’t Quit” seems like a bit of an eye-roller at first it’s a song about desperately wanting to quit smoking weed. Despite his name, and the opening track which juxtaposes Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine” with speeches about black power, Kembe is best as a lifestyle rapper, something that he shows off more ably later down the line. Then too, there are his politicisms which come off as artificial. Rapping over VERY smooth boom-bap beats that harken back to the early nineties, Kembe occasionally oversteps the bars’ orthodoxy: “when I be high, I be observin’ the fuck out of shit” is a somewhat charming but also really stupid lyric and when he calls Lil Wayne “a fucking faggot” on opening track “X,” the obscenity is so out of character that he immediately asks us to pardon his French. The affable seventeen year old, who belongs to a loose Chicago collective known as The Village, frequently needs some time to shake the cobwebs off, but once he does, he’s unquestionably worth listening to. It takes a while for Kembe X to hit his stride both on a song by song basis and over the entirety of his first mixtape, Self Rule. Jonah Bromwich called the X-Clan revival first.
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